In all our large towns where I formed Associations for the Care of Friendless Girls I was in the habit of reporting my work to the clergy of my own church, whose sympathy and cooperation I shall ever gratefully acknowledge.  Ultimately, the leading laity, as well as some Nonconformist ministers, joined with us; often these conferences were diocesan meetings—­to which, however, Nonconformists were invited—­with the Bishop of the diocese in the chair; and after my address free discussion took place, so that I had the advantage of hearing the opinions and judgments of many of our leading men in regard to this difficult problem, and getting at men’s views of the question.

The matter that I lay before you, therefore, has been thoroughly and repeatedly threshed out at such conferences, as well as in long, earnest, private talks with the wisest and most experienced mothers and teachers of our day; and it is in their name, far more than in my own, that I ask you to ponder what I say.

Do not, however, be under any fear that I intend in these pages to make myself the medium of all sorts of horrors.  I intend to do no such thing.  It is but very little evil that you will need to know, and that not in detail, in order to guard your own boys.  We women, thank God, have to do with the fountain of sweet waters, clear as crystal, that flow from the throne of God; not with the sewer that flows from the foul imaginations and actions of men.  Our part is the inculcation of positive purity, not the part of negative warning against vice.  Nor need you fear that the evil you must know, in order to fulfil your most sacred trust, will sully you.  This I say emphatically, that the evil which we have grappled with to save one of our own dear ones does not sully.  It is the evil that we read about in novels and newspapers, for our own amusement; it is the evil that we weakly give way to in our lives; above all, it is the destroying evil that we have refused so much as to know of in our absorbing care for our own alabaster skin—­it is that evil which defiles the woman.  But the evil that we have grappled with in a life and death struggle to save a soul for whom Christ died does not sully:  it clothes from head to foot with the white robe, it crowns with the golden crown.  Though I have had to know what, thank God! no other woman may ever again be called upon to know, I can yet speak of the great conflict that involved this knowledge as being the one great purifying, sanctifying influence of my life.  But even if, as men would often persuade us, the knowledge of the world’s evil would sully us, I know I utter the heart of every woman when I say that we choose the hand that is sullied in saving our own dear ones from the deep mire that might otherwise have swallowed them up, rather than the hand that has kept itself white and pure because it has never been stretched out to save.  That hand may be white, but in God’s sight it is white with the whiteness